Paul Gilding tells us our economy is not sustainable in his recent TED talk.

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Long Beach, California—Paul Gilding wants to scare us. He wants to scare us into acting before it's too late. "The Earth is Full. Full of us, full of our stuff. Full of our waste," he said during his TED talk. In financial terms, we live on the Earth like we are spending 50 percent more than we earn.

Gilding has been agitating for sustainability long before most people became aware of the concept, and he has a bleak message for the prospects of the free market. Our economy is not sustainable, and woefully unprepared for hitting the Earth's limits. It's not just a little bit over the limits of sustainability, either—we are way beyond that.

But humanity has a tendency to think it is only getting started. We imagine economic development magnitudes greater than we have now. This is the very same growth we rely on to solve poverty, to make life better. But open-ended growth is simply not possible, Gilding argued. So, instead of counting on this train never stopping, we might be better off assuming it's going to go off the rails. And he used his TED talk to try to drive the idea home.

"The idea that we can smooth these transitions" through economic difficulties so that "9 billion people can live in 2050 a life of abundance and digital downloads," he said, is "dangerously wrong." The system will break down, it will stop working for us, and we're not doing enough to prepare for that. And it's not like we haven't seen it coming. We've had 50 years of warnings from scientific analyses. And, if that weren't enough, we've had economic studies showing us that it would be better for us to not to wait—that it will ultimately be even more profitably for us to act sooner—but we're doing very, very little. Our eyes are still on the short term, whether it's food, water, or waste.

Gilding argued that we have to have our best economic minds, our best entrepreneurs, communicators, and leaders, shift their thinking to one unassailable fact: "We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet." We need that kind of intellectual backing because people simply do not want to believe this. They have amazing faith in technology, that it will help us solve these problems somehow, someway. Although technology has overcome many once-thought impossible problems, Earth is a finite resource, and technology has never had to overcome the finite nature of the planet we live on. We have to prepare for the end of growth.

"The most important issue we face is how we respond," Gilding notes. "The crisis is now inevitable. The issue is how we react." To be sure, it would be better to react now than latter, in part because we don't know for sure what bubble will pop first. Gilding asked his audience to imagine what happens if the carbon bubble bursts. Nations will battle not just for gasoline, but food and water. Thirty percent unemployment in America could be the norm. It will fundamentally change society. It will fundamentally change how we think of the future.

Yet our national dialogue is fixated on gas prices. Our assumptions about the future presently have little bearing on what will actually happen when the lights go out on the global economy. We are hiding from ourselves.

And this is where Gilding saw the value of fear. The truth is, we should all be afraid. Fear is an appropriate response to danger. If we harness that fear now, we still have time. If we wait until the lights are out, it's going to be nasty. Tapping into fear is important. The fact is, we need to change how we feel, because only that will change how we act. Free market fundamentalists are wrong; we do not have limitless resources, and if growth is the only solution we have to offer to our problems, we will eventually be terribly wrong.

"This could be our finest hour," Gilding concludes. But we must start thinking and planning now for the end of growth. And to do that, we probably need to be afraid of the alternatives.

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Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher

301 Reader Comments

Let the largest distributed decision engine every imagined, the free markets, figure out how to manage the resource crisis. Call me a "free market fundamentalist" if you like, but I'm fairly confident that time will sort out who was right in the end.

Tl,dr: I have faith that humans are intelligent, rational, and altruistic, and will magically not continue the bad behavior that they've been doing every single day since recorded history.

The sparsely populated frontier with abundant resources has generally always been available to humanity. Until recently that is. Meanwhile, our needs have grown. So while people have been wrong about crisis and inevitable restructuring before, this time they just may not be.

Because it's entirely unworkable. The amount of fuel and resources it takes to get just seven people into space is enormous.. and we can barely keep that small number of people alive and functining. We're talking BILLIONS of people.

And then what do we do with those people? Venus, Mars and the Moon are all uninhabitable and with the exception of the Moob, they're all far, far too far away to make it work.

You're right, today it is entirely unworkable, so let's not try to work on that.

I'm not talking about something that will happen in the next generation or so, but I don't think the Earth will max itself out within the next generation, either. My problem is with the attitude of "space programs don't do anything for us, so let's scrap them."

How is keeping up research for the future a bad thing, whether it produces exodus-quality space travel or not? Even if it doesn't, we'll learn some valuable things along the way. By creating what it takes to survive in an inhospitable place, along with the vastly increased energy efficiency we'd need for that kind of thing, we might not even need to leave.

I'm not saying to put all our eggs in that basket, just to explore it as one avenue, even if it's unlikely.

See, at least in the old days journalists feigned neutrality. Ars takes it a step further and seems to profess a noble, scientific, consensus-based approached to the real world.

But this shows that cover to be a hilarious sham. The political dogma has leaked through before, but in this case the mask comes off entirely. Science and research is all and well in physics, and how dare the ignorant question the scientific consensus anywhere else, but in economics? Oh yeah, screw those guys, lets ride rough shod over that huge body of work and report the ramblings of an extremist that's totally outside the mainstream and pretend he's making credible statements. Good work, Ars. Deep down, I always knew your world views were rooted in Malthus and his discredited ideas, and the forums have long since been stuffed with people who are very well informed in their own fields but can't comprehend, thanks to brainwashing and focused educations (ie, ones not including some basics in economics) things like how Africa might follow the East Asian model and isn't necessarily doomed to eternal poverty, or can't comprehend how economic productivity marches on quarter after quarter, etc.

I got no problem with all this in general, but there's just a little too much arrogance in the forums and too much of an air of scientific neutrality that a site like Huffington Post, for example, doesn't pretend to. It's a left-wing blog site and doesn't bother to hide it. So is, apparently, Nobel Intent; it merely has a primary focus on things in science, with the occasional foray in to left-field.

Someone also listed the guys publishing record on the first page of comments. What a joke. Waste Management and the Environment? Oh boy, a bastion of economic luminaries, for sure. American Economic Review & AEA, econometrics journals, they better all watch out. This guy might publish an op-ed in the Sydney Times and really outshine them. -.-

See, at least in the old days journalists feigned neutrality. Ars takes it a step further and seems to profess a noble, scientific, consensus-based approached to the real world.........

I don't really see this to be a politically based issue. More of a technological one. And part of our "technology" does include things like 'money' and 'markets'. The fact is there is an amazing growth in demand for resources. What is the outcome? How do we deal with this?

It appears by the body of your posts you feel voting republican is the answer? Maybe, but I think we are going to have to look a little bigger than that sooner or later. Probably sooner. Even if we don't believe in global warming:)

Actually, if Gilding's talk is peer reviewed science, that aspect wasn't mentioned in this article.

Suppose fossil fuel prices continue to ratchet up over the next decade or so and the result is massive but gradual investment nuclear power and in transportation that doesn't rely on fossil fuels for energy storage. Are we still just as doomed over the course of the next century? While the kind of speculation that this talk raises can be healthy, treating it as scientific fact is just as bad as citing Nostradamus.

Why does Ars choose to post B.S. fearmongering crap stories like this? Paul Gilding should team up with Nouriel Roubini and the two of them should take a flying leap.

They are not helping humanity advance itself and get to a better place. Actually, this story makes me shut down and tune out.

You should be scared. Thanks. Real productive.

How about some constructive solutions? Though, I really don't think there are any. To do what mankind needs to do and return to a balanced way of life we would have to choose to collectively return to the stone age.

I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Humans can't respond effectively to a cliff unless its two feet in front of them. Even then we sometimes don't see it. Unless there's a tangible, meangingful, right now fight or flight threat, I think we're incapable of change.

People like Paul Gilding are part of the problem because they advocate the worst possible thing we could do to harm our future: stop growing in population and economy. Only the panic of ignorance can make so many people take such a regressive viewpoint.

We HAVE to grow our way out of the problem, if you don't want to suddenly and permanently reduce your standard of living. Many of our problems cannot be solved at the same economic or technological level at which they were created. A society of 1,000 people cannot create something as technologically advanced as say, the iPhone (think factories, power plants, refineries, chip manufacturers, etc. all necessary to produce an iPhone at scale) even if they had access to unlimited resources. Greater numbers of people in a growing economy, yield access to affordable technology that was impossible at lower numbers because free-ish markets are not a zero-sum game.

We already know of technologies that are capable of saving humanity even with current growth rates, and it involves increased efficiency in our energy use in combination with access to resources we already have, but cannot effectively harness (think advanced led lighting meets advanced solar power). Without growth, we cannot produce the life-saving, energy-saving, energy-harnessing technology of the future that we KNOW is possible due to our understandings of physical law.

People like Gilding spread fear of only savior using static analyses engineered to frighten ignorant people. We are our own worst enemies here, because the solution to our problems is counter-intuitive, and most people are incapable of grasping it.

Consider that we literally do not have enough people that are highly-skilled in many growth industries (see articles regarding how silicon valley companies buy out start-ups just for the talent acquisitions they can't fulfill any other way) and that we have already accessed most of the low-hanging fruit in terms resources. If we regress in people and economy, we may permanently render ourselves incapable of growing again (imagine rusted oil rigs, not enough people with the expertise to build anything better, and not enough access to oil to fuel the devices necessary to build the next generation of power plants).

These are serious issues, but I have lost complete faith in the regressive, there-should-be-fewer-humans, and there-should-be-slower-growth environmentalists to do anything about it except spread panic and poison people to the real solutions. The scientists, engineers, and average Joes necessary to build and discover the future, will as always, pull the environmentalists kicking and screaming toward the sustainable future they say they want, but actively stand in the way of achieving.

And to the people that say they won't have children because WAAAAH WE'RE ALL DYING—good. I don't want the ignorant children you'd probably raise poisoning the collective thoughts of humanity. I mean, if you don't have enough of an understanding of history or of the roadmap to the future that is visible in achievable next generation of technologies, you will never get it: If you're in a developed nation, you live during the absolute BEST time in the entire history of the PLANET, and the future looks even brighter. Look past your noses.

Things will get dicey when hundreds of millions of people in China and India suddenly realize that they're doomed to grinding poverty forever. It's not simply a matter of resources - the elephant in the room is that the market may not be able to find something useful for 9 billion people to do. The driving industries of the modern economy have a weak relationship between output capacity and required labor, and the old blue collar industries are working apace to minimize their own labor requirements. Underemployment is bound become an increasingly severe problem even in the developed world. For Christ's sake, we already have a glut of PhDs.

Nothing a good nuclear war won't solve. The sad part is, that's probably how the problem will eventually get solved.

1) The Industrial Revolution was all about the harnessing of energy. That's the only thing that makes all of our technology viable. All of our technology is a consumer/manipulator of energy, there's very few gadgets that can create it.

2) The industrial revolution is fueled by fossil fuels. This is soon coming to an end. There hasn't been a gain in worldwide petroleum production since 2004-- so we are at a plateau. (Sure, we have tar sands, oil shale, and the like... but that stuff isn't nearly as cheap/easy to deal with as good old fashion crude)

3) The Green Revolution (the huge gain in global food production from 1940 to 1970) only happened as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution, as modern farming is heavily reliant on petrochemicals as well as petrol powered machinery. Even fertilizer is loaded with nitrogen made from natural gas. Not to mention the fuel used in processing, packaging and transport of foods.

So it all boils down to energy sources; fossil fuels can't be counted as a growth vector for the next several hundred years. But I have my doubts that people as a whole can comprehend that.

Well you kinda just wistle past a pretty important mitigating factor there in number 2 ("Sure, we have tar sands, oil shale, and the like") Doesnt that parenthetical kinda make your conclusion incorrect (fossil fuels can't be counted as a growth vector)?

Alternative oil sources have picked up, but they haven't been able to offset the decline of traditional crude. Hence the whole world is stuck at 2004 level production levels since... 2004. As traditional crude declines even more, there alternatives won't nearly catch up since the EROEI for these alternative sources is wayyy worst then good old fashion crude.

1) The Industrial Revolution was all about the harnessing of energy. That's the only thing that makes all of our technology viable. All of our technology is a consumer/manipulator of energy, there's very few gadgets that can create it.

2) The industrial revolution is fueled by fossil fuels. This is soon coming to an end. There hasn't been a gain in worldwide petroleum production since 2004-- so we are at a plateau. (Sure, we have tar sands, oil shale, and the like... but that stuff isn't nearly as cheap/easy to deal with as good old fashion crude)

3) The Green Revolution (the huge gain in global food production from 1940 to 1970) only happened as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution, as modern farming is heavily reliant on petrochemicals as well as petrol powered machinery. Even fertilizer is loaded with nitrogen made from natural gas. Not to mention the fuel used in processing, packaging and transport of foods.

So it all boils down to energy sources; fossil fuels can't be counted as a growth vector for the next several hundred years. But I have my doubts that people as a whole can comprehend that.

Well you kinda just wistle past a pretty important mitigating factor there in number 2 ("Sure, we have tar sands, oil shale, and the like") Doesnt that parenthetical kinda make your conclusion incorrect (fossil fuels can't be counted as a growth vector)?

Alternative oil sources have picked up, but they haven't been able to offset the decline of traditional crude. Hence the whole world is stuck at 2004 level production levels since... 2004. As traditional crude declines even more, there alternatives won't nearly catch up since the EROEI for these alternative sources is wayyy worst then good old fashion crude.

Actually, if Gilding's talk is peer reviewed science, that aspect wasn't mentioned in this article.

Suppose fossil fuel prices continue to ratchet up over the next decade or so and the result is massive but gradual investment nuclear power and in transportation that doesn't rely on fossil fuels for energy storage. Are we still just as doomed over the course of the next century? While the kind of speculation that this talk raises can be healthy, treating it as scientific fact is just as bad as citing Nostradamus.

That might put it off for another half-century... but eventually we will run out of fissile material, and then what?

The jist of it is that the sum of energy available on this planet is finite no matter how you slice it. The sun has a finite mass, as does the earth. We as a species will eventually reach a point where the energy we can harvest is not sufficient to sustain the lifestyles we are used to. That's not science fiction, it's physics.

At our current rate of exponential growth, that point can't be more than a century or two off. Now, these types of predictions are notoriously inaccurate because they don't account for system shocks... but any possible system shocks are likely to be unambiguously bad for most of us.

See, at least in the old days journalists feigned neutrality. Ars takes it a step further and seems to profess a noble, scientific, consensus-based approached to the real world.

But this shows that cover to be a hilarious sham. The political dogma has leaked through before, but in this case the mask comes off entirely. Science and research is all and well in physics, and how dare the ignorant question the scientific consensus anywhere else, but in economics? Oh yeah, screw those guys, lets ride rough shod over that huge body of work and report the ramblings of an extremist that's totally outside the mainstream and pretend he's making credible statements. Good work, Ars. Deep down, I always knew your world views were rooted in Malthus and his discredited ideas, and the forums have long since been stuffed with people who are very well informed in their own fields but can't comprehend, thanks to brainwashing and focused educations (ie, ones not including some basics in economics) things like how Africa might follow the East Asian model and isn't necessarily doomed to eternal poverty, or can't comprehend how economic productivity marches on quarter after quarter, etc.

I got no problem with all this in general, but there's just a little too much arrogance in the forums and too much of an air of scientific neutrality that a site like Huffington Post, for example, doesn't pretend to. It's a left-wing blog site and doesn't bother to hide it. So is, apparently, Nobel Intent; it merely has a primary focus on things in science, with the occasional foray in to left-field.

Someone also listed the guys publishing record on the first page of comments. What a joke. Waste Management and the Environment? Oh boy, a bastion of economic luminaries, for sure. American Economic Review & AEA, econometrics journals, they better all watch out. This guy might publish an op-ed in the Sydney Times and really outshine them. -.-

Funny that you just spent four paragraphs complaining about the article and the following forum postings while offering NOTHING meaningful to counter the factuality of any of them. Instead you arrogantly complain about the "arrogance" of others.

A large portion of the worlds population lives on a buck or two a day. Most of their income is spent on food. So food prices double like they have at my grocery store in the last 5 or 6 years. I don't like it. Less money for video games. But in other parts of the world it is riots in the streets.You don't hear much about it on standard new media but there are millions of people in danger of starving in the Horn of Africa right now. Huge numbers. More than at any other time in recent history I believe. Something like 12 million people at risk for starvation. The point being food prices at these levels cause massive social unrest. Pakistan. A good oil shock doubling food prices again and you may see a nuclear armed country with some very agitated citizens. It doesn't have to be this way. But for right now and the way things are set up it is. Meanwhile we are giving subsidies to turn corn into gas and the Chinese are realizing that they too should be eating cherries imported from Chile in the winter. In no way am I arguing for state control nor do I even have a solution. But people who think the problem is not immediately upon us are dead wrong.

We HAVE to grow our way out of the problem, if you don't want to suddenly and permanently reduce your standard of living.

I thought the standard of living at 3-4 billion was pretty good, actually. You're saying that for technology to advance it requires more starving people?

I guess educating a stable pool of people to the best of their collective abilities and building on past knowledge is not the answer.

Where did you find me state that we require more starving people? You're missing the point. Most of the starvation in the world occurs for political reasons, not lack of ability to feed. I don't want to spend forever sourcing everything, but look up any number of regimes in Africa to find how those in power allow food sent from other countries to rot on the docks in order to keep the populations subjugated. Like so many other things, the ability to feed people is a technological and political problem, not a population problem (because we already produce enough food and because we can scale food production faster than reasonable expectations of population growth).

And no, educating a limited pool of people is not the answer because it's limiting. The purchasing power, productivity, and intelligence of 3 billion people is less than that of 6 billion people. Even if you really, really educate all of them, you're lacking access to the same productivity, intelligence, and purchasing power of 6 billion+.

The thing that is needed is to scale progress faster than population growth and ecological concerns. In that context, the universe is limited, but not very limiting. The same principle is used by governments to service their debt: they encourage the economy to grow faster than the rate of debt and interest growth (and so far, it has worked surprisingly well for America). Overall, humanity has always managed to scale it's progress faster than it's population growth. Stop thinking of a flat Earth.

The purchasing power, productivity, and intelligence of 3 billion people is less than that of 6 billion people. Even if you really, really educate all of them, you're lacking access to the same productivity, intelligence, and purchasing power of 6 billion+.

We've got over 6 billion now, many starving, yet somehow the increase over 3 billion hasn't eliminated that unfortunate fact. So at 12 billion will things magically be better?

Why do I get the impression you're advocating an endless Ponzi scheme?

Quote:

Stop thinking of a flat Earth.

Ok... there. I just stopped thinking of a flat Earth. (I never was originally, but why quibble.)

This is because GDP is a measure of the total *value* of *transactions* in an economy. GDP can grow given fixed resource consumption, by having more transactions and/or adding more value at each transaction.

GDP can also grow while using *less* resources, e.g. if people value recycling and lower carbon or energy emissions higher and are willing to pay for it, we get GDP growth while *reducing* our resource use.

Once upon a time economies were mostly based on agriculture (resource consumption), then on industry and manufacture (resource consumption), but today the larger part of western economies are based on services, although resource consumption per person has also gone up till now. There's plenty of scope for the amount of resources used to decline while still having overall economic growth and improved living standards.

In short, the fact that Earth's resources are finite does not impose an automatic restriction on continued *economic* growth.

Obviously, you can't have unbounded growth in a bounded space. That's so trivially obvious that Malthus doesn't really deserve any credit for pointing that out. It's much more important to understand how Malthus was wrong.

The crux of the issue, really, is that people produce more than they consume, and have done so ever since we invented agriculture. This is part of how Malthus was wrong. It's not unique to humans that we're capable of producing more than we consume: there are many species of carnivore that could kill more prey than they need to eat, but they stop when they've got enough. The unique thing about humans is that we deliberately produce more than we consume, and cycle the surplus back into further increases in productivity.

That raises the question: when do we decide that we're producing as much as we want? And that's where it becomes relevant why Malthus was making the argument he was: he was arguing against the Poor Laws, an early attempt at a government social safety net, on the grounds that improving the living conditions of the poor would be self-defeating, as humanity had already reached the limit of its potential population and quality of life. But part of the point of a social safety net is to redistribute wealth. If people produce more than they consume, why is anyone poor? What Malthus was really arguing for was maintaining social stratification, with the claim that no other way was possible.

Part of the madness of our world is that the rate at which we increase our productivity is more rapid than the rate at which our standards of living improves. In fact, one of the most astonishing things about the US is that living standards, having gradually increased as a shadow of increasing productivity, suddenly and abruptly stopped increasing in the early 1970s. In real terms, mean wages have been static for forty years, even though productivity has doubled in that time. So apparently increasing production is not driven by individual consumption. So why is it in the interests of most people to keep escalating production?

I believe that, as with reproduction, if production and distribution were under the control of the majority, rather than the minority, we would actually tend to reduce production. As it is, I believe much of production is ultimately waste, from a humanistic perspective.

I see the usual mention and bashing of Malthus. I personally regard Malthus as being correct in the long run. Exponential functions beat linear ones from my observation (someone show me a graph where food is increasing exponentially). But I just wanted to point out that the view we have of Malthus these days is pretty much wrong. His original essay was a short summary of his ideas. Later as a result of the response he got he gathered more data and produced a more comprehensive work in 1803. Eventually, he produced 6 editions and a summary in 1830. The 1803 edition however was different, it shows a different more caring Malthus.

Here is an account of a researcher who came across the 1803 edition. I found it enlightening. It is long. And you can just press the "show transcript" button if you don't want to listen to it.

Obviously, you can't have unbounded growth in a bounded space. That's so trivially obvious that Malthus doesn't really deserve any credit for pointing that out. It's much more important to understand how Malthus was wrong.

The crux of the issue, really, is that people produce more than they consume, and have done so ever since we invented agriculture. This is part of how Malthus was wrong. It's not unique to humans that we're capable of producing more than we consume: there are many species of carnivore that could kill more prey than they need to eat, but they stop when they've got enough. The unique thing about humans is that we deliberately produce more than we consume, and cycle the surplus back into further increases in productivity.

That raises the question: when do we decide that we're producing as much as we want? And that's where it becomes relevant why Malthus was making the argument he was: he was arguing against the Poor Laws, an early attempt at a government social safety net, on the grounds that improving the living conditions of the poor would be self-defeating, as humanity had already reached the limit of its potential population and quality of life. But part of the point of a social safety net is to redistribute wealth. If people produce more than they consume, why is anyone poor? What Malthus was really arguing for was maintaining social stratification, with the claim that no other way was possible.

Part of the madness of our world is that the rate at which we increase our productivity is more rapid than the rate at which our standards of living improves. In fact, one of the most astonishing things about the US is that living standards, having gradually increased as a shadow of increasing productivity, suddenly and abruptly stopped increasing in the early 1970s. In real terms, mean wages have been static for forty years, even though productivity has doubled in that time. So apparently increasing production is not driven by individual consumption. So why is it in the interests of most people to keep escalating production?

I believe that, as with reproduction, if production and distribution were under the control of the majority, rather than the minority, we would actually tend to reduce production. As it is, I believe much of production is ultimately waste, from a humanistic perspective.

There is a book called "The Worlds Wasted Wealth" which speaks to the succinct point you raise. What it says is that "waste distribution territories" or zones of non-productive effort arise to claim their share of excess resources which are produced. Law. Insurance Sales. Much of management. The huge wastes of the medical profession. Government bureaucracies. Everyone "working" while actually consuming the extra rather than producing anything at all. And jealously defending their right to do so at all costs.

The purchasing power, productivity, and intelligence of 3 billion people is less than that of 6 billion people. Even if you really, really educate all of them, you're lacking access to the same productivity, intelligence, and purchasing power of 6 billion+.

We've got over 6 billion now, many starving, yet somehow the increase over 3 billion hasn't eliminated that unfortunate fact. So at 12 billion will things magically be better?

Why do I get the impression you're advocating an endless Ponzi scheme?

Quote:

Stop thinking of a flat Earth.

Ok... there. I just stopped thinking of a flat Earth. (I never was originally, but why quibble.)

So how's the Ponzi scheme doing?

There's no magic involved. I'm taking essentially two assumptions. The first one deals with the theoretical limits to what is possible for us to achieve with technology (hint: the limits allow for technology that can solve all of our problems and then some). See Ray Kurzweil or Michio Kaku to get you started. The second one treats human beings as resources in their own right, rather than parasites (generally speaking).

The end to the scheme is the point at which we can provide for a growing number of people at negligible ongoing cost. That's something we're already well underway to accomplishing with information, by the way. Or was the printing press good enough? Yes, there is obviously an upper bound on population growth, but measuring it in the billions is woefully inadequate. I imagine that by the time we get anywhere close, additional children will be made of information and run in a simulation for negligible cost. Google the simulation argument by Nick Bostrum for thought-expansion here, in case it's needed or desired.

You've got to have a little faith in human ingenuity and understand just how far from good enough our current lot is now. It's about higher-order problem solving. Don't attack a problem like hunger by scaling back, attack it by inventing a hunger-solving machine while moving forward. Be forward thinking.

"Free market fundamentalists are wrong; we do not have limitless resources, and if growth is the only solution we have to offer to our problems, we will eventually be terribly wrong. "

That is so wrong its hard to even know where to start. Free markets are all about determining how to allocate *limited* resources, not about some assumption that resources are unlimited. Im not even sure what that part about growth being the only solution is all about. That whole sentence is a badly constructed strawman.

Actually, Free Market is a straw man.

There is nothing free about it.And it's certainly isn't a market.

Thus your whole argument falls apart. And you that clueless you come out with the corker ". Im not even sure what that part about growth being the only solution is all about."

I guess you don't watch the news, where a drop in growth is portrayed as the end of the fucking world.

When actually, increased growth (consumption) IS the end of the fucking world.

Pig shit people will remains pig shit people. See quote for an example of one.

Yeah some people might die, and some bad stuff might happen. But ratio of good stuff to bad stuff is constantly improving (and has been for many centuries). Maybe there will be 4 billion humans in 500 years. Maybe there will be 100 billion. Who knows (not us! and anyone who says they do is full of s**t). We can't even predict the biggest events of the next 10 years... But I do know that we aren't going anywhere.

Progress will continue. We will not stop amazing ourselves with awesome technological discoveries and life-improving breakthroughs. I'm personally very excited for the day in the next 10-20 years when my automatic car will drive me home from the bar while I'm piss-@ss drunk! woot!

Also, can we have more information about Gilding and why he's qualified to make these kinds of statements? This article needs to be filled out more. It needs background, and perhaps a few academic citations, to back this up.

What qualification you need to understand the basic tenet: "infinite growth is impossible with finite resources"? It is remarkable how few people understand such a simple idea. All the mainstream media blabber about economic growth, about economic recovery and what not. I have never ever read in a MSM that eternal growth not only is not a good thing, but eventually leads to a crash. This, unfortunately, reinforces the image of mankind as a glorified version of yeast that eats up it's sugar, poisons itself with ethanol and die out.

It's disheartening to read something of such poor caliber on Ars. Bad editing aside ("We imagine economic development magnitudes greater than we have **know**", the content demonstrates either a fundamental lack of topical knowledge, or willful effort to mislead people. The author mentions the use of fear as a tool of persuasion (false logic per se) and never addresses that the speaker's notions are centuries old and have been disproven not only by sound research, not to mention (literally) the very world we live in today, as compared to the world pre-1776 (referring to the year that a certain Scottish moral philosophy professor published his best-known work). Very disappointing coming from Ars. By uncritically echoing a poor (patently false in this case) argument, even using quotes, you align yourself with it.

I think the key issue with solving this dilemma is that the kind of democratic political systems that have become common in the 1st world are really not well suited to dealing with long-term planning.

When your government and the politics around it are constantly in a state of preparing for the next election in order to retain power then very little long-term stuff happens.

Politicians are generally self-serving twits but place them in a situation where they have a choice between laying down plans to deal with the next two decades ensuring they they get re-elected/promoted in the next two years and you can bet that 99% of them will be more worried about re-election/promotion.

The unpleasant truth is that an autocratic state is technically better suited to dealing with this kind of thing.The problem here is that autocratic states are generally run by people even more stupid and incompetent than the politicians of democratic states.

Personally, I hold little hope for the future and really wouldn't mind if sentient machines evolved and took over because they would probably do a far better job of running the show...

Also, can we have more information about Gilding and why he's qualified to make these kinds of statements? This article needs to be filled out more. It needs background, and perhaps a few academic citations, to back this up.

What qualification you need to understand the basic tenet: "infinite growth is impossible with finite resources"? It is remarkable how few people understand such a simple idea. All the mainstream media blabber about economic growth, about economic recovery and what not. I have never ever read in a MSM that eternal growth not only is not a good thing, but eventually leads to a crash. This, unfortunately, reinforces the image of mankind as a glorified version of yeast that eats up it's sugar, poisons itself with ethanol and die out.

The problem with such a statement, is that it's a meaningless tautology. Infinity > finite. So what?

What's important is how anyone expects us to solve our problems by scaling back. In case you haven't noticed, fire fueled by dead trees allowed people to read in the dark among other things, and we used it to invent electric lighting (giving magnitudes more people the ability to be productive in the dark, with magnitudes less energy use per light output). How can we climb the ladder by pulling the rungs out? How do we get here from there?

Honestly, move past your own hysteria for just a moment. Now you're with me, and we both agree that we need solutions to our problems. What's you answer? Want the job of convincing everyone to throw away their iPhones and stop having children because consumption is evil? Is that your plan? You think that's going to work? Or would you rather work on a way to enable the things we take for granted and a whole lot more. If you want that, you need to get with the program, and start thinking about how you can help push technology forward and allow people to own more of the devices they love and continue to give birth to children they love. Otherwise, you sound like a fire and brimstone preacher.

And for the love of god, do you really see humanity as nothing more than yeast? What in the name of all that is holy does the human race have to do to impress you? You don't think humanity's rise from ape to something that can use a computer to argue with someone else on the other side of the planet almost instantaneously from the comfort of a climate controlled environment amounts to anything more than yeast? This basically says everything I need to know about you, if true.

All is not lost. The technology we need to solve this mess is coming. The question is whether it'll come fast enough. Scientists expect the first commercial fusion reactors to go on the net in 2050. They already have them working, just not on the scale and efficiency we need yet. With that, we'll have more energy than we can even use for several centuries. Nano factories could help us reduce the costs to produce basically everything there is tremendously, but they are still a long time off.

After that, we'll just have to figure out how to leave this god damn rock. It's possible, we just don't know how yet. If we manage to do that, our species should be safe for the next several thousand years. As soon as we leave our galaxy, we're talking about millions of years. After leaving our current universe, eternity.

We just have to be fast enough. Unfortunately, we invest more money into iPads than life saving technology, so it'll really be a tough call.

It's clear that the crazy-consumerism approach has to stop at a point in the future. Firstly, because we can't afford to buy more houses, more cars, more electronics appliance, or neither we will be able to afford to change them more often, and trow away the old ones. For example, in Italy, a country now in recession, the number of cars that were sold in 2011 is just a notch above the number of cars sold in 1980, and down more than 40% from the beginning of last decade. Second, even if we will be able to tamper the energy limit-problem in the next 50 years, the finite-resource problem will become even bigger: lots of cheap energy for our economy will be like a drug dose for a drug addicted.We need to change completely our approach to resources. If we can turn our economy in a closed cycle, where 100% waste regeneration is mandatory, we will need just energy to growth. And growth won't be measured by how many object we own, but on quality of life basis. We have to face this and even more great social challenge in the future, and for this, we need to research and invest on new schooling system, so that next-generation will have the instruments to tackle these problems.

People who put too much faith in perpetual growth and poo-poo the idea that we need to start reining it in and adapting to zero growth should watch this. Then it would be a good idea to go back to the first video in the series.

gml142 wrote:

There's no magic involved. I'm taking essentially two assumptions. The first one deals with the theoretical limits to what is possible for us to achieve with technology (hint: the limits allow for technology that can solve all of our problems and then some).

So basically you're just assuming the answer will be found, and acting as though this is assured because it's an assumption. Sounds incredibly dangerous.

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See Ray Kurzweil or Michio Kaku to get you started.

I'd love it if Kurzweil was right, but I can't take that for granted.

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The end to the scheme is the point at which we can provide for a growing number of people at negligible ongoing cost.

This is physically impossible. Try subsisting on a negligible ongoing cost in terms of real resources. Negligible food, negligible water, negligible space. The the US the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer and we're not seeing that trend reverse despite our advancing technology.

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Yes, there is obviously an upper bound on population growth, but measuring it in the billions is woefully inadequate. I imagine that by the time we get anywhere close, additional children will be made of information and run in a simulation for negligible cost. You've got to have a little faith in human ingenuity and understand just how far from good enough our current lot is now.

Again, this is the magical thinking part where you just assume that an answer will be found and act as though this is guaranteed (taking it on faith). What if this isn't true? How should we as a society structure ourselves: as though we can continue to be as wasteful and wreckless as we always have and that one day we'll live in the Matrix for no cost in resources, or that one day we'll cut down the last tree on the island with that attitude?

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Don't attack a problem like hunger by scaling back, attack it by inventing a hunger-solving machine while moving forward. Be forward thinking.

It's totally irresponsible to act as though hunger-solving machines are assured at some point in the future. The way we live in the US right now is already such a burden that it would take 4 Earths for everybody in the world to live the same way. Were we always this much of a burden, was it always the case that the way we lived here would have taken four planets' worth of resources to sustain everybody else? No, because at one point almost everybody else did live the same way. The population was a lot smaller and their demand for energy and highly refined things (like computers, cars, electricity, all the technology you're pinning our hopes on) was less. We have become more resource-intensive as time went on, not less. This is why we need to stop the business-as-usual, perpetual-growth thinking we've always engaged in. We need to rethink the problem instead of assuming that it'll work itself out eventually. This is not to say we need to "scale back" or turn away from technology, it means we need to start living within our means sooner rather than later because the longer we wait, the less means there will be to live on.

Malthus was wrong because all of his ideas flowed from an incorrect assumption, that, left unchecked, human population would simply grow without bounds.

Well, looking at the numbers, it does look that he was right:

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It didnt.

That comment implies that the era of fast growth in world population is behind us. It's not.

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As people become wealthier, they have less children, high population growth is a symptom of poverty. Once the industrial revolution began lifting people out of poverty, population growth started to slow to the point where most industrialized countries are close to, or have gone below replacement levels.

Well, there's few problems with that. First of all, it does not change the fact that the population of the world is still going up, and fast. And second: while rich countries have lower birth-rate, the people they do have consume a lot more resources than poor people do.

As we build on what we already know by learning new things, we decrease the amount of effort it takes us to do a given task. This is the core of growth and progress – the ability to accomplish things more easily today than we were able to accomplish them yesterday. And until we are prevented from studying and learning, there will be no end to growth on Earth.

Of course, we can, indeed, make things easier for ourselves by finding more 'already made' stuff, but this is far from the only (or even the most important) way of accomplishing that goal.